Normalization

It’s such a peculiar phrase. It sounds like “punch her right in the mouth,” not like anything erotic. I guess that’s the point – it combines punch her right in the mouth with the sexual (but definitely not erotic) note. It does make you think…because it’s so hostile, and so obviously hostile, yet these shits say they think it’s funny. Why is hostility to women so normalized? Why is it so normalized that twisted fucks actually think it’s funny? Why would it be funny? If people kept shouting “kick him right in the head” at male reporters would anyone see it as funny? Would it become funny if it were “kick him right in the balls”? It wouldn’t, would it; it would just be weird. But shouting “Fuck her right in the pussy” at women doing their jobs, that’s seen as funny.

Trying to get into their heads, not endorsing: perhaps they think it is funny because they know on some level they are violating social norms. In the same way that comedian Andrew Dice Clay was briefly popular around 1990: his only talent was to swear and be offensive, and some target audience mistook this for talent and humor.

Um, is it wrong if as a man I find “kick him right in the balls” funny? (well context-dependent ofc). I mean, “ballbusting” is a thing, not something I’m into, but the kind of thing one finds funny while extremely unpleasant at the same time.

Also, linky doesn’t work for me neither… that other phrase doesn’t sound half as hirlarious. Actually kind of creepy.

In the movie “Idiocracy,” which admittedly has plenty of problems, I recall the most popular TV channel is one that consists of nothing but people getting kicked in the balls over and over again. People in that world find it positively side-splitting, and watch it around the clock. So perhaps that’s where this is all heading. Sure there’s plenty of misogyny in the movement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also a dash of close-to-the-surface sadism.

Orwell thought the worst possible future was “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” But he missed the mark — he forgot the thing that would have made it truly dystopian: a bunch of yabbos standing around yucking it up while the face-stamping is going on.

I really don’t think they find it funny as they may claim when asked. I think that’s a front. They want people to dismiss it as humor, but what they find enjoyable is making it known that women are below them in society and that such harassment and flat out nasty behavior can be done publicly without causing a fuss.

I really don’t get it either. Are these people acting out the same urge as kids shouting “wee-wee” and “poo-poo” when they feel that they need to get the attention of a bus full of people? That’s a pretty embarrassing moment for the parent involved, too, and sometimes a “Wow, I can really make mum/dad cringe and they can’t do anything about it!” power moment for the kid, but I thought that there’s a point in growing up when the fabled F-word, P-word, S-word etc. lose their scandalous appeal.

Ysanne, I think you have got it, plus of course, (Carbonfox) “The possibility of scaring or humiliating or at the very least inconveniencing a woman is damn near the most hilarious thing in the universe.”

So, you have the joy of shouting nasty words in public AND the supreme pleasure of publicly humiliating a woman, all of which you can defend by the claim “It’s just a prank! Don’t you have a sense of humour?”

I really don’t think they find it funny as they may claim when asked. I think that’s a front. They want people to dismiss it as humor, but what they find enjoyable is making it known that women are below them in society and that such harassment and flat out nasty behavior can be done publicly without causing a fuss.

I think it’s exactly that.

There’s a lot of bullshit about hierarchy and power in our society. Repeating the obvious, but anyway: the narrative a lot of people swallow and/or try to sell is that we’re over all that, that since we’ve laws on the books that technically make discrimination for various reasons illegal, hey, we’re done, nothing to see here, move along. There’s a deliberate attempt to ignore and or impugn the veracity of sociology, too, especially, where the research indicates so strongly otherwise, indicates very clearly that there’s plenty of the old hierarchy alive and well. Won’t expand; I expect people know the whole messed up story only too painfully well, here.

But people are sensitive about social power, power in relationships–I think they pretty much have to be–and I think people know pretty damned well when they’ve got power, and what power they’ve got, especially when they’re exercising it so noisily. Privilege blindness is a thing, sure, but this, I think, is more: ‘I figure I can get away with this, and I’m gonna try’. That ‘just a joke’ veneer might pull out all the stops on how really, it shouldn’t be a big deal in our wonderfully post-sexist utopia, but I think they know perfectly well what they’re doing. They’ll never admit it, and might drive you up the wall with increasingly unlikely justifications, if you tried to corner them on it, but they know. Same as they know about money, same as they know about class.

Mentioning money, that, come to think of it, should give us a clue, and maybe refine and explain this a bit. Money in our society and power are very intertwined; the former is an extremely prominent and important indicator of/subset even of the latter. And look at how most (if not all) people treat money. Depending on how much you have, you may have wider settings on how touchy you get about x dollars going out of your pocket, but there’s a bracket at which you absolutely notice and care, and, really, you have to. In parallel, sure, anyone in a demographic with enough inherited/assumed power, especially, is going to be blind, to some degree, to how the other half lives, to the problems they face; that’s your privilege blindness…

But they know damned well there is another half, and that they’re not in it. They may choose to be willfully blind, even, about what the other half is facing, but that’s just in the details. They still know only too well it’s a very different world, because they know also it’s a world they can treat like a muddy football, from without.

I’ve actually had some nitwit on Youtube trying to convince me that because this is an internet meme intended to mock the news industry it therefore has no sexual meaning. Denial is not just a river in Egypt…

#15. I suppose I was thinking about myself. I cannot imagine myself saying something like that unless I had a medical condition like Tourette’s Syndrome. I realize that this guy is most likely a clueless jerk.

Rich Roberts— No. This is not “some clueless jerk”. This is ordinary, standard, acceptable male behavior. That you’re noticing one very obvious example does not mean that this is an outlier or confined to just a “clueless” minority of individuals. It’s important that you understand this and take it on board. One of the ways this behavior gets normalized is by everyone stating that it must be a fluke, it must be a particularly bad man, he must be crazy, etc.

It would be interesting to interview people (who say such stupid weird things) in more than 30 seconds…actually try to get them to explain what they are doing, saying. I suspect they’d reveal themselves (and make them self-aware) as very stupid, almost infantile — just a reflex of a baby without any intention…a series of sounds without meaning.

I am not trying to therapize them but simply to sit such an idiot down and ask them to explain why the sentence is funny….even merely to explain what it means… “Fuck her right in the pussy” is such weird syntax…clearly, as said here, it’s not even remotely erotic…a guy (even in coarse locker room banter — which is much less prevalent than women think) a guy would never say “Wow! Last night I fucked her right in the pussy.” (Assuming a native English speaker.)

The first thing (beyond immediate disgust) which strikes me is “Huh! What the fuck does the creep on TV actually mean?”

I have been reading some of your latest posts which deal with is incredibly violent form of harassment. Not only is it not funny, it is surely actionable, as a form of words which actually threatens criminal action. Anyone who uses such language should be fired on the spot by any supervisor/employer who becomes aware of it. There is no justification for urging criminal action, as well as for the kind of sexual harassment that this constitutes. Why should anyone’s employment be continued who, whether during workdays or at other times, make a public demonstration of such barbaric attitudes? What is the problem with people who do this kind of thing? This is exceptionally violent and threatening language, and if those who are using it do not realise that it is, and do so in public, in such a way as to provide evidence of the threat, there is no reason why an action should not be brought for threatening criminal action against the person concerned. What is happening to our public space where normal expectations regarding politeness and respect seem to be totally ignored?

I can remember being in Durham, walking with my wife Elizabeth along the Wear River, just across from the cathedral, and a few senseless yahoos on the other side shouting out what they intended to do with Elizabeth should they catch her: filthy, vile descriptions in quite graphic terms. They were teenagers running wild in the Summer – which doesn’t excuse them, of course, and it quite spoiled our evening, which was so beautiful. What has happened that adults think it appropriate do this in kind of thing in a public space and expect that people will find it humorous? What has happened to common civility?

#20. I agree with you and #15. It’s my inability to communicate. I was trying to put myself in the guy’s place and I simply cannot understand why he would behave like this. I know that it’s not uncommon and that women experience this sort of thing on a daily basis. It’s totally unacceptable. I did not mean to seem like I was explaining his behavior away or make excuses for him. That was not my intent.

If people kept shouting “kick him right in the head” at male reporters would anyone see it as funny? Would it become funny if it were “kick him right in the balls”?

Given that some people make a game out of “sack tapping” (hitting a male in the scrotum when they’re not paying attention), the answer is undoubtedly yes. Some people find inflicting pain or humiliation on others funny.

This is ordinary, standard, acceptable male behavior. That you’re noticing one very obvious example does not mean that this is an outlier or confined to just a “clueless” minority of individuals. It’s important that you understand this and take it on board.

Well, it certainly isn’t ordinary, standard, acceptable male behaviour in the circles that I move in. If it has become ordinary, standard and acceptable, something is seriously, seriously wrong. I went through nearly 11 years of university study in the 60’s and 70’s (last century, of course), and never encountered this kind of behaviour. If it has now become normative, we really are in trouble. It seems that some (many?) people’s worldview has become hypersexualised. By the way, qwints, “Kick him in the balls” is not comparable to “Fuck her right in the pussy”. The first is simply violent, the second is clearly sexual in intent, and, as Ophelia says, reduces women to a ‘gash’. This is not only crude and uncivil, it is also a threat (as I have already said) of sexual violence, which I find very troubling. This is not in the slightest funny, and it is hard to see why anyone would find it so.

Yes, I really think you’re overstating that, Josh. It clearly is normalized in some circles. Those guys all clearly thought it was fine plus hilarious. But it’s not in all circles.

I’m very interested in how this kind of thing works – in how horrors get normalized. How people can hack a person to death with machetes because they hate the person’s views on religion. How people can like to watch animals being tortured as an amusement. How torturers can go about their job.

I agree with Eric MacDonald. Such language is not even remotely “ordinary, standard, acceptable male behavior” in any part of American society that I have ever encountered, now or ever. I am not sure how to disprove it but likewise, there is no evidence that it is common.

Comedy is when I cut my finger. Tragedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. People laugh at other people’s pain all the time, but the fact that someone finds something funny doesn’t justify or redeem an otherwise harmful act.

Following up on my @ 26 – like Eric and David (albeit without the access to all-male gatherings they have) that it’s not universal, but I would add that it is a horribly large circle that it is normal in. If you follow me.

No, this is not considered normal, civilized behavior. *In theory*. But it is normalized enough that the men participating have no fear at all of serious consequences when they perform this harassment on television. That we have to debate (“we” meaning “society at large”) if this is “just a prank” at all shows how this kind of behavior is not de-normalized nearly enough.

If I exaggerate how normalized it is (and I probably do, though not with intent to mislead) it is because I’m trying to highlight the danger of the common response. That response is, “I can’t believe this happened.” There’s a disconnect between what we say is “unacceptable” and how society as a whole actually treats this behavior. How it rewards, punishes, or ignores it. I see a surfeit of shock and surprise for something that, while more extreme than we usually see every day as individual viewers, is far more common and accepted functionally.

Shorter: The actual, functional ways that society responds to this male harassment are at odds with what society claims—in name and in theory—is unacceptable, beyond the pale behavior. It’s not as beyond the pale as it needs to be.

I worry that we’re all inadvertently on a “shock treadmill” where we express our surprise and outrage, but not enough and without sufficient consequences to make this behavior as actually rare and shocking as we say that it is.

Please be willing to accept the possibility, everyone, that it’s simply that you personally, especially if you’re a man are not as likely to see or notice harassing behavior. It’s much too confident to say, “there is no evidence this is common/acceptable.” That’s objectively not true, or not as true as you believe it is and are willing to argue that it is. Once you begin to see the pervasiveness of man on woman harassment, it becomes clear that a whole lot more of it is going on than you ever knew before.

I’ve been there. It wasn’t until about five years ago that I really woke up to this. I believed this was far less common than it actually was.

Josh, your point about normalized and acceptable makes sense to me and I agree. I knew you didn’t mean it’s absolutely normalized across the board in society.

I’m not making this comparison to rank victims of bigotry, but to support your statement that it’s “normalized enough”:

Imagine if that guy had leaned into the mic and said something violent about black people while also using a racial slur. How many employers would say “Well, that’s his free time”? How many people on here would start talking about a double-edged sword?

Yet when he says something violent about women while also using a gendered slur, we get a different response. We should treat misogyny the same as we’d treat racial bigotry.

I would not want to say that there are not circles in which this kind of language/behaviour is normalised. However, to the extent that it is, what we are witnessing, I’m afraid, is the breakdown of civil society. That’s sad as well as troubling. Life is really not worth living if this kind of language and behaviour becomes common and everyday. I realise that there is a lot of sexual harassment that women are supposed to pass off as a joke, and I think it is time that this kind of public disrespect of women be made a punishable offence. A fine would do. It would make it clear that this kind of behaviour is not socially acceptable, and there are enough people around now with phones that can record video and audio that finding evidence should not be difficult, and if people were regularly fined for this kind of anti-social behaviour, I think a lot of it could be brought to an end. Women in public places should not have to put up with the kind of vulgar harassment that many are subject to, and we should see that there are reasonable penalties for engaging in it. I think, once it touches enough pocketbooks, the tendency to accept this kind of behaviour would become less common.

Josh is right about this being normalized behavior. But it’s not the ‘circles’ you’re in that dictate how much harassment you endure or witness, it’s location. This sort of harassment is ordinary in public spaces full of people who don’t know each others’ names. There are plenty of people who behave just fine in the company of people to whom they have been introduced, but turn into Mr. FHRITP on the bus or at the ball park.

And as for why they do it: it’s a dominance display. The point is, well, to display dominance. As long as no one successfully makes them stop, it’s a win.

(btw: an overlapping but non-identical population makes racist dominance displays in the same sorts of public places. The racism may be enacted differently than the sexism, but it is still very much there.)

I think when drunk men are in a group in public their socialization to be “civil” to others is scraped off and the bigotry and hatred that is just below the surface simply flies out of their mouths. I don’t think it is necessarily the break down of civil society. We know about it now because iPhones etc can document it (for good or ill) and various internet sites can distribute it rapidly. My hunch is that this kind of behavior is not new as much as it is better documented and spread about. And #8 raises a good point. Saying that “it’s funny, it’s a prank, it’s a joke” is a front, childish but a total fake “I am an innocent joker” response, and also part of the insult, both minimizing the horror and demeaning women even more b/c it implies that we can’t take a joke and are humorless). And like Ophelia I am very curious about how anti-social horrors become normalized. It certainly cannot be adaptive in modern life. . .

^ I think that’s right, and I also think it’s a feedback loop. We know about it now because of iPhones and Twitter and Reddit etc etc – therefore people see it’s “normal” in some circles / some places, so they do it too or more, which we know about because of iPhones and Twitter and Reddit etc etc, repeat ad infinitum.

I wonder if there is any sort of fact-based objective way to determine if in fact it is “ordinary, standard, acceptable male behavior” to say things as described (i.e. the repulsive language in the link.)

My belief is that it is not even remotely normal behavior. Others disagree. Is there a way to go beyond “yes-it-is/not-it-isn’t”?

One might argue, for example, is that the very fact that the language gets so much public note is because it is so unusual and that women have been empowered to tell men to stop it. So trend lines also matter.

David – I thought the disagreement had been pretty much resolved? That’s it’s not universally normal, but at the same time there are circles, or circles combined with circumstances, where it is normal.

I mean we can see just by looking at that video that there are people – guys, in this case – who at least when drunk are fully confident that it’s normal. We can see it just by searching Twitter or browsing Reddit or YouTube.

Obviously there are weird/sick/stupid people out there. And some, when violent e.g. 911 terrorists, have influence far far beyond their miniscule numbers.

I guess I’m a numbers guy and always ask in almost every situation “Yes, and let’s do the arithmetic.” An example would be “Islamaphobia” — ANY number of such incidents is too many. But it’s useful to put the issue in perspective if one is going to make “widespread Islamaphobia” the basis for changes of the law or in fact any sort of public policy/conversation.

In the movie “Idiocracy,” which admittedly has plenty of problems, I recall the most popular TV channel is one that consists of nothing but people getting kicked in the balls over and over again. People in that world find it positively side-splitting, and watch it around the clock. So perhaps that’s where this is all heading. Sure there’s plenty of misogyny in the movement, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also a dash of close-to-the-surface sadism.

Oh, sure, there’s a ‘pure sadism’ element there. In fact, that might be the dominant element–where the misogyny lies, essentially, is in determining ‘acceptable targets’ for those sadistic impulses. Many folks have suggested for comparison’s sake a variety of male-targeted variations (“kick him right in the balls”, here; I’ve also seen a similar discussion that pointed out the lack of people shouting “fuck him right in the ass”, which would be the more direct counter-example). The reason we don’t see these occurring as much isn’t necessarily because the shouters would not if they could get away with it, but because there’s an unspoken understanding that they very likely would NOT be able to get away with it–both the social feedback, and the likelihood of the target resisting or even escalating, are much higher if men are the target. So targeting women, in a fashion that becomes almost impossible to even accidentally be taken as targeting men, is the preferred outlet for that sadism.

“Acceptable targets” plays into, as an example, the rash of police shootings of unarmed black men (and boys), too. The impulse of authority figures is to wield that authority to its utmost. However, white, middle class men are able to push back against an institution that is excessively repressive. So instead, they target the economically vulnerable and, of course, people of color (the mentally challenged are also frequently targeted for police brutality–again, they are marginalized, unable to push back for themselves, and with few people willing to do so on their behalf).